Friends of Micronaut (and Machines fans apparently) Jorge and Pollo came to the San Diego show, and were kind enough to take the noise.to.signal.05 team for a quick jaunt through Tijuana afterwards. We hit a couple of local bars, and the studio of an artist friend of theirs, who turned out to have some really interesting intaglio work (at least, I think it was intaglio). Many coronas later, we made it back to the border – just in time for the morning crush of Mexican citizens headed towards San Diego for the day’s work. I’ve seen a lot of traffic jams in my day, and this was one for the books. We spent about an hour in traffic to get through the last 500 yards in front of the border (it would have been more like 2 hours but for Jorge’s insane yet extremely effective driving). Arrived back at the hotel exhausted but none too much worse for wear… enough time for a few hours of sleep then on towards San Francisco for Tuesday’s show at DNA. This should be a good one – it’s been a few years since I’ve been to DNA and I hear it’s amazing now.

We made it to Los Angeles in time for the show, amazingly. That was something like 30 hours of driving, stopping only long enough to refuel in between Lake Charles and Los Angeles. I drove the stretch from Lake Charles through El Paso - almost 15 hours straight. And then some more from Tucson to Phoenix. It's amazing what you can do when you're determined.

The show at Bar Sinister went well, despite a few glitches with the lights (still not sure what happened there). I can't remember ever playing a show in a more exhausted state than last night's, but the turnout was good and the audience seemed receptive to all three bands.

Now, after a much, much -much- needed rest, we're off to San Diego for Brick by Brick tonight.

Location: 30.25579 degrees North, 93.17956 degrees West, 41.99 feet

Another day here in sunny Lake Charles, Louisiana. Word from the transmission shop is that they'll be done with the Mystery Machine today. But we don't know precisely when. If they're done before, say, noon, then we stand a good chance of still making the Los Angeles show. If it's later than noon, the odds of getting to LA in time for load-in begin to diminish. If we're out of Lake Charles later than about 4pm then it's probably a lost cause.

With any luck the next update will come from the road, when we're on our way. But then, luck hasn't exactly been in abundance lately.

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Update: Looks like they're almost done with the transmission, meaning that we -should- be able to get on the road by about 1pm (Friday). This leaves enough margin for error (though just barely) that we should be able to play the LA show. Time will tell, but things are at least starting to look up a bit.

Mystery Machine's transmission gave out, about 20 miles from Lake Charles, Louisiana today. This means there'll be no Austin show for sure, and Los Angeles is going to be more difficult to do than we expected.

Based on preliminary feedback from the mechanic it looks like we're looking at a -very- expensive repair (a new transmission, and a new radiator which apparently was the reason for the transmission going out). So we're confined to Lake Charles for at least a day, possibly two.

The only good news in all this is that the people here have been exceptionally friendly and helpful. While we were waiting for the tow truck, several people stopped to see if we needed help. The folks at the transmission shop were friendly and understanding about our situation. Even the hotel staff have been unusually nice to us.

I'm not really sure what to make of the awful string of events of late. One of my dogs passed away yesterday, and now this. I'm not nearly as upset about the van as I probably would be if it weren't for losing Cheese; that's foremost in my mind and probably will be for the foreseeable future.

"Some days you eat the bear, and some days the bear eats you."

"In a world older and more complete than ours they move finished and complete, gifted with extensions of the senses we have lost or never attained, living by voices we shall never hear. They are not brethren, they are not underlings; they are other nations, caught with ourselves in the net of life and time, fellow prisoners of the splendour and travail of the earth." - Henry Beston

Cheese, 1997-2005

The show in Pittsburgh went ok. On the upside, no stairs like in La Crosse. On the downside, the stage monitors were underpowered, and kept cutting out during everyone’s sets – that was annoying. But it was an early show, and we had a very smooth load-in and load-out, so we got to the hotel at a reasonable hour. Come to think of it, normally 3am isn’t exactly an early night for me, but on tour it qualifies you for Ben-Franklinesque “early to bed…” status. No lights or video for this show, but it’s good to know that I don’t need them to play a passable set.

The hotel turned out to be in the middle of a renovation, and didn’t have high-speed Internet running despite the assurances of the night clerk that it was. I often let that sort of thing go (these days a number of truck stops have high-speed Internet, though availability varies a lot depending on where you are in the country), but I’d gotten up early, foregoing a full night’s sleep so that I could catch up on email. So my “unacceptable situation” button got pushed and I negotiated a pretty steep discount on the room when I checked out. I found myself having to convince the hotel manager that simply offering a working phone line was not tantamount to offering high-speed Internet.

One of these days I need to look into cellular modems…

The next show’s in Austin, which is obviously not exactly a stone’s throw from Pittsburgh. So the next few days should be a mostly relaxed schedule of driving. No load-ins, no monitors to worry about, just lots of road. Oh, and lots of toll booths. Have I mentioned my severe, downright militant hatred of toll booths? That’s a topic for another time.

I think I now have my sea legs. Tonight’s show in Milwaukee went very well… a great audience that seemed to be genuinely into it, good sound, and yes, the right amount of fog. I made more mistakes than usual, but luckily “close” counts with this sort of thing. After the set the promoter egged the audience into hollering for an encore, which for better or worse is an impossibility at this point. I briefly considered suggesting a Kumbaya sing-along, but thought better of it. I’ll have to work on that whole what-to-do-if-people-actually-like-it thing.

Actually, one thing was definitely sub-par for this show – the sound on stage was truly awful, though that’s never a showstopper unless it’s either way too quiet or way too loud. Instead, it was just badly distorted, which is annoying but isn’t that big of a problem. As CR pointed out, it sounded like “Godzilla’s ass”.

After the show one female member of the audience wanted an ARF baby doll t-shirt and asked Brian if she could have one in return for a peek at her, uh, t-shirt parts. Brian deferred to me, and I politely declined – but the offer was certainly notable as a first. I tried to give her a couple of stickers as a sort of consolation prize instead (hey, it was a creative offer – she deserved something), but she didn’t seem to be too thrilled with that idea. She said something to me, but between her intoxicated state and Godzilla’s ass, it came out as “THUMP THUMP THUMP THUMP uhrrrb skklm mnn club brjehemmmmm THUMP THUMP THUMP THUMP”. I’m not really sure, but I’m guessing that translated roughly to ,“Good sir, I respectfully disagree with your decision not to trade this fine women’s apparel for a look at my tits.”

The show in Pittsburgh is only about 18 hours from now, and Pittsburgh’s about 10 hours from here if I’m not mistaken. I’ve pretty much been running a sleep deficit since the start of the tour, so the next 24 hours is going to be interesting.

At this show, I ended up using not nearly enough fog, instead of too much… see what I mean about it being difficult to make that work right? The problem with too much fog is obvious – with too little, the effect of the light show is substantially reduced since you can’t see the light beams. I’m sure we’ll get it right eventually. Thanks to CR’s video backdrop (basically a giant piece of canvas) and a well-placed harness for the video projector, we had the ideal setup to run video for the show. The venue in La Crosse (Warehouse) is great, but has one drawback – it’s on the third floor and has no elevator… meaning a lot of work to move equipment in and out. But what the hell, how else am I going to get exercise on this tour?

CR and I have a running debate about whether or not GPS is useful or needed for touring. I brought a laptop GPS attachment, which Chris poo-poos as being unnecessary. Now, granted, CR has toured more than I – so he’s a lot more comfortable navigating around the country. But I advocate knowing where you are, so that 1) you don’t waste time searching for the venue, hotel, or whatever, and 2) if you’re low on gas you know exactly which way you need to go, and how far. Yesterday we almost had to put that theory to the test, as we ended up in rural Minnesota with a nearly empty tank. We knew where the nearest town was (from the road signs), but not whether or not it was big enough to have a gas station. CR’s intuition paid off, and we were able to find gas without using the GPS – though to me it was a fairly close call. It doesn’t help that the tour van’s gas gauge is insanely inaccurate – it stays on Full until about 2/3 of the gas is gone, then it abruptly shoots down to 1/4, where it again sticks until you’re almost out. Not exactly conducive to long-haul driving.

Here’s a sign from a hardware store across from the venue in La Crosse. I’m sure we can all relate to this problem:

Tonight was the first show of noise.to.signal.05. - in St. Paul, MN. Monstrum Sepsis and Micronaut both played good sets, and I think the ARF set was decent… except for one thing. In the hurry to set up, I didn’t spend enough time dealing with the fog machine, and I set it on “autopilot” just before I went on. As a result I pretty much fogged the fuck out of the club during my set. Serious pea soup territory, not to mention "Lighting 101 Things To Never Do" territory. By the time I realized it was a problem, I couldn't see the fogger's remote control anymore, so it just got worse throughout the set.

It’s hard to get “just the right amount” of fog, in part because every club is different in terms of airflow, volume, and so forth. It’s best to have a live human controlling the fog machine but for this show we were trying to keep things simple. So much for that plan… well, all told it wasn’t that bad of a screw up, but kind of embarrassing.

Prior to the tour, I drove from Phoenix to Chicago, to meet up with Christ et al. That took three days of driving – thankfully my friend Melissa was kind enough to go with me, which helped a lot. We ended up driving through a fairly massive storm system in Missouri – apparently one that included a number of tornadoes (though we didn’t know it at the time). Around dusk you could look in the direction away from the storm, and see daylight. In the direction of the storm it was pure black. Day and night at the same time, a pretty amazing sight. I’ve never seen that much lightning at one time, and the individual bolts were gigantic. Melissa caught some of it on video...see below. Strangely, Chicago, the “windy city”, seemed to be the least windy area of the whole drive. Maybe in part because of that big storm system, everywhere we stopped between Phoenix and Illinois was insanely windy – enough to slam doors right back in your face when you opened them. Once in Chicago, we stayed overnight at Palmer House, which came highly recommended from several people. It’s certainly an impressive hotel, especially the main lobby/atrium area. I hadn’t realized it was owned by the Hilton chain, and had I known that sooner I probably would have stayed somewhere else. Yeah, I know it’s petty, but still – the thought of contributing to that particular dynasty, even on a minute scale, is distasteful at best. So now we’re on the road. First stop’s St. Paul, MN. I’m a little apprehensive about the first show, which isn’t surprising. But for me, the previous ARF show in Mesa was something of a warm up, so at least I have most of the major kinks worked out at this point. Still, it takes time to get used to being on stage again.

(note the scale of the lightning in this pic, compared to the semis on the road in front of us)